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    Night of the Republic

    Page 3
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      not to sound like, saying "Honey, listen to me, honey.

      Honey. Honey. I am not your mother. I Am Not Your Mother."

      Then she holds the phone away from her ear so even I can

      hear the tiny insect-buzzing of what against her ear would be

      his shouting back.

      Starlight has to bend, the writer says, around that invisible dense

      matter,

      warping itself in order to be seen.

      So even after we factor in the distorting eff ect of time and distance,

      the light-years of light-years that light has to cross to reach

      us, the visible shapes we see inside our giant telescopes look

      nothing like the shapes they are.

      There's a white shark on the wall next to the television screen

      where I see an aerial view of a funeral procession or a

      rally—fists shake in unison, and if the sound weren't muted

      I might hear voices chanting, but all I hear around me is a

      thick gauze of bar talk and laughter and the woman saying

      over and over, honey, honey, listen, honey, honey, while

      on the screen I continue looking up at what I'd be looking

      down on if I were there:

      the massive seething a quivering cell seen under a microscope,

      a dense coating of flies on something dead.

      Then there's a lake, and a bright red Jeep flies out of it and lands

      safely on a dirt road and drives off right to left as if into the

      open mouth of the bright white shark.

      The writer of the article describes dark matter as a black canvas

      on which the visible universe is painted. If that fi gure captures

      best the relationship of gloom to glitter, couldn't the canvas

      also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if

      the ten percent that doesn't hide were being imagined by the

      ninety percent that does?

      Dark matter. She is not his mother. She refuses to be his mother.

      But there are places in the cosmos, however few and far between,

      where "galaxies form where no dark matter is, at least none we

      can detect."

      In the physical therapy room of the nursing home my mother

      placed my grandmother in after she slipped in a puddle of

      urine and fell and broke her hip, the old, the damaged,

      at various stages of infi rmity, were working with therapists

      at different stations in the room—one woman looked quizzically

      at her hand, as if it wasn't hers and wasn't not, matter

      neither dark nor bright, as it tried to squeeze a yellow ball,

      over and over, only the tips of her fingers twitching, while the

      young therapist, more girl than woman, kept urging her on the

      way a mother would,

      though she was not her mother,

      saying, "That's it, Lois, come on now, kiddo, you can do it, you

      did it yesterday." And nearby, a man wizened to his very bones

      held fiercely to the rails of a small track down which he took

      unsteady small step after small step, like a toddler crossing wet

      stones—he was followed by another woman with her hands

      out ready to catch him if he fell. Everywhere inside the room

      the young the healthy, the fortunate, were encouraging the

      old, the sick, the hobbled—everywhere the old, eyes burning,

      were pushing back with all the might inside their bodies

      against the dark matter their bodies had become.

      Places, the writer tells me, where light too is a force, light too a

      kind of pressure

      though my grandmother refused it, sitting in her wheelchair, looking

      on, her silence the darkest matter, an impossible density

      nothing could get around without distortion, broken only by

      her saying when my mother came to visit

      You are not my daughter, I don't have a daughter,

      saying it over and over, as if she knew my mother would carry

      the voice inside her ever after, beyond the funeral, no matter

      whom she spoke to, or where she went, the voice reverberating

      in her voice reverberating in the ones she loved, the

      ones who loved her

      the distorting effects of time and distance nothing the shape it is

      the white shark is swallowing the president who shakes the hand

      of another president in a bright room made brighter by the

      flash of cameras

      and an old man yelling as he carries a child to some kind of safety

      from a smoking doorway

      the woman flips shut her phone and stuffs it in her bag and disappears

      and again the lake spits out the Jeep that lands safely on the

      ground and drives away.

      III. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC

      Amphitheater

      In the dream time

      of the molecular

      what persists as

      colonnade

      or stair is struggling

      blindly to hold

      back, hold

      in, what in it,

      of it, every

      moment wants

      to whirl away

      from what it is.

      It is a kind of keeping

      faith, a loyalty,

      the way the garbled

      pieces of the

      architrave call back

      the column that's

      no longer there;

      how even now

      the horizontal rows

      of nearly worn-

      away-to-nothing

      seats rise steeply

      all around the inside

      of the colossal oval

      that encloses

      the missing stage

      where Pindar isn't

      singing, "Take heart,

      remember Oedipus:

      if a sharp ax

      hacks off the boughs

      of a great tree

      so its beauty spoils and

      its fruit fails,

      it can still give

      an account of itself

      should it come later

      to a winter fire,

      or should it rest

      at last on a foreign

      pillar performing

      its sad task

      so far away

      from what it started as."

      Museum

      So much of once

      and now and soon

      is or will soon be

      caught here, framed and glassed—

      free of the drifting air—

      and hung, so that

      the very halls

      that lead from room

      to room are rooms

      themselves that make room

      in little dim-lit alcoves

      all along them for what

      there wasn't room for

      in the other rooms.

      On the wall outside

      each doorless doorway

      the audio guides lined up

      like black-suited

      miniature docents

      are waiting to tell the story

      of the ambition and the breakthrough

      to the early to the later

      to the late or belated

      recognition of the name

      whose final triumph was to

      end up in the digital

      recording of the nameless storyteller

      telling the story

      to the inglorious and mute.

      All night, inside each

      doorway there's an empty chair

      that keeps watch

      over an empty bench

      that watches the cordonedoff

      and glassed-in

      figures revert to pigments

      that revert to dyes,

      oils
    and the mineral

      grains that press

      against the glass

      to pass right through it

      into the air they came from,

      alive again—docents of dispersal

      drifting from room

      to room through hallways

      down the marble stairs

      out past the headless Winged Victory

      they entered by.

      Bookstore

      As if hallucinations made of words

      could hallucinate themselves beyond the words,

      out of the books, out of the newest

      on display behind the window, and the ones

      on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves

      in different sections; out

      of the pages building to betrayal,

      out of the spectral signatures

      of doom of boredom of deceit,

      after the stranger comes to town,

      before the girl's disgrace, before

      the shadowy flood or fire,

      the bodiless mimicries escape

      tonight the tangling plot lines

      into the bodies of the couple

      kissing outside the store,

      into the ardor of the way they kiss,

      he leaning against her leaning back

      against the window, his hands flat

      on the glass above her head,

      hers on his hips to draw him

      farther forward while her leg rubs

      up the inside of his thigh

      and down, and up again,

      higher and still higher,

      while the books behind them keep their own sweet time,

      serene because the wraiths return,

      inevitably, tomorrow or next week

      or years away and a cooler hand

      will take the book and open to a passion much

      more desolate for being mutual

      and new and never ending

      till the page is turned.

      Barbershop

      "Beauty falls from the air."

      —Thomas Nashe

      Eternity is the spiral up the pole

      spiraling to its endless end.

      Time is the vitrine

      of antiquated gels,

      conditioners, restoratives,

      stray sections from yesterday's Today

      all over the table

      in the waiting area where

      Eternity is waiting.

      Time is the electric

      razors upright in their chargers

      beside their teeth-like

      att achments, and the scissors,

      the clippers, the trimmers,

      on the mirrored shelves

      attached to mirrors

      that the big chairs face,

      unswiveling.

      Eternity

      is the swept floor,

      the bald air,

      the faceless mirrors,

      while Time, and its one idea

      of beauty falling,

      is a book of blank pages

      ghostwritt en by

      Eternity in vanished

      passages of hair.

      Post Office

      A convex mirror tilts downward from the corner

      where wall and ceiling meet

      behind the nearly room-length counter.

      In the center of the mirror

      what's beyond the counter

      bends a smaller version of itself above the counter

      out toward itself below it

      while the room's periphery

      curves back into the dark

      the center's bending from.

      Parallel to the counter

      the rope barrier

      strung straight from post to post

      curls into itself within the mirror,

      though parallel to it and just as long

      but too far back beyond the mirror's border

      to be caught within it

      there is a narrow table

      with pens at intervals

      that hang at the ends

      of silver chains

      or lie in a silver tangle on the surface—

      while one chain dangles penlessly

      like a silver snake's sloughed skin.

      The mirror is a litt le world, a globe, a map.

      Back against the far wall

      there's a wider table

      for the giant book

      of everywhere

      and slots and holders for every size

      and kind of envelope or label

      all of which tonight are unaware

      of the out-of-the-blue

      or dreaded plea plaint news

      or notices they'll be tomorrow—

      And if the mirror is a map

      this table is the blank space

      on which the mapmaker scrawls—Here Be Monsters.

      Here be indecipherable codes,

      unreachable addresses,

      every letter a dead letter,

      unclaimed, untracked,

      from no from

      to no to.

      Convention Hall

      There was the amplified and echoing

      "optimistic hatred of the actual"

      that every flag waving

      to make it so kept

      waving to the joyous rhythm of

      even after

      in the docile chaos of a

      confetti of balloons

      tumbling out of darkness

      high above the lights.

      Look at Us, the anthem,

      Look at Us, the shield,

      the sacrifice—

      but look

      at how unfillable

      the cavern of the Great Hall is,

      more vacant and silent

      for the stage dismantled,

      the massive absence

      of the cheering and singing; look

      at how the last of us,

      our delegate

      torch in hand

      sleepwalks in patrol

      patrolling nothing

      like a soldier "in the

      midst of doubt, in

      the collapse of creeds"

      who doesn't know

      the war has ended,

      behind enemy lines

      no longer there,

      obedient to "a cause

      he little understands,

      in a campaign

      of which he has

      no notion, under

      tactics of which

      he doesn't see the use"—

      moving in darkness

      from light to smaller light

      along the catwalks

      through the tunnels

      over the swept floor

      to the farthest exit sign.

      Government Center

      All of the old buildings that surround it

      with their embellishments,

      their frills, their flauntings,

      have turned away, embarrassed

      by how nakedly

      outside

      outside is here.

      At night especially,

      nothing is not exposed

      to whatever it is

      that's looking out

      from within the rising of the set-back

      or jutting, many-angled

      brick and concrete large

      to small to smaller openings

      that swallow

      whatever light they cast.

      At Washington and State,

      the wide brick stairs lead up to wide brick stairs

      up to the bricked

      expanse, the brick field of the benchless plaza

      edged here and there by lampposts whose light

      spotlights the litt le public trees

      that tremble leafless

      and raw in stone tubs

      for everyone

      who isn't there

      to see.

      If you were there, walking,

      you wouldn't be able to tell

      the sound of other footsteps

      coming toward you


      were your own.

      You'd have to hurry not to feel

      the feeling of what it is

      you're being told

      about the feeling of being

      looked at, looked through, tracked

      by every brick

      and concrete

      angle of the opaque

      openings you can't look up at

      into

      as you hurry past.

      Courtroom

      Hillsborough, North Carolina

      Everything inside the room

      looks upward

      through penumbral zones

      from the ghost ship of the gallery's

      galley-rows of benches to the

      waist-high balustrade

      that is the barrier

      we call the Bar, and from

      the tables beyond the Bar

      to the lectern facing

      the high desk

      we call the Bench,

      behind which

      above the flag we call the Flag,

      high on the wall to where

      the circle of the seal is

      across the bott om of the outer

      rim of which

      the legend in a language

      no one speaks

      is speaking silently to no one:

      Esse Quam Videri—To Be

      Rather Than to Seem—

      Like what? the two girls

      staring out inside the seal

      appear to ask, like what?

      in white robes—

      Greek or Roman, Roman or Indian?

      a Roman's seal's Greek fantasy

      of an Indian princess and her att endant,

      the princess seated

      on a tree stump, on a beach,

      the water calm behind her,

      as she looks down

      past the Bench, the Bar, the strict rows

      of low benches in the gallery

      where the absent galley slaves

      lashed to the public oars

      are rowing nowhere

      and so can't notice

      that a ship over her shoulder

      (is it the ship they row?)

      is sailing straight for the horn of plenty

     


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